Mourning You

Description

'Mourning You' - the new record from BONNIE TRASH, the infernals of Guelph, Ontario - is, to put it frankly, an album about death. Not death in the macabre, violent, or scandalous sense, but death as you or I might know it. A specter lurking around the corner. Capricious, blind, and unexpected. Ordinary and all the more terrifying for it. Real. The fear in a loved one's eyes on the verge of dying, and the fear in your eyes - looking back. Bonnie Trash is the project of twin sisters Emmalia and Sarafina Bortolon-Vettor, marrying the steely-eyed austerity of post-punk with the gloomy grandeur of gothic rock. 'Mourning You' finds Bonnie Trash embracing a new sense of urgency. A lifelong project christened in 2017 with the release of Ezzelini's Dead, the band's first EP in which the duo harnessed the Trevisan dialect and archaic Italian folklore of their heritage for macabre effect. Where their debut album, Malocchio, wrapped Bonnie Trash's nightmares in dark, dreamy reverb, Mourning You is sharp and immediate. Emboldened by the addition of Emma Howarth-Withers on bass and Dana Bellamy on drums - whose thunderous rhythms honed the 2024 EP My Love Remains the Same into a fine blade - 'Mourning You' is less a post-mortem fantasy than a sudden, swift dagger to the heart. This is not lingering grief, but a gushing wound. Sarafina, the band's singer and lyricist, has described the album as being about "losing someone you love." It is about the horrors of grief that haunt you every day. Largely inspired by the passing of Nonna Maria - who provided interstitial narration in the band's early work - it is these intimate details that make the songs on Mourning You so devastating. The record explores love and grief as soulmates. Grief as love with nowhere to go. Love defined by the fear of its loss. A blood pact. A life for a life. The gnarled claw of remorse seizes you in the terror of twilight. "I see you in my dreams every night," Sarafina intones on "Hellmouth." Without Emlia's blown-out Stratocaster, you might mistake these words for the refrain of an old doo-wop standard. The track starts as a haunting siren song, like Slowdive at full blast, before hitting you with anthemic power chords for Sarafina's self-lacerating chorus. "Drag me to hell and I'll go back." "Veil of Greed," meanwhile, relentlessly channels all the icy malice of Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine. The song's horrific imagery - feasting on hearts with rotten teeth - shows Sarafina worshiping at the altar of her own agony. "I bow to you and I know / You feed." However, perhaps the best embodiment of the spirit of Mourning You is "Your Love is My Revenge," a blazing song for the dark night of the soul. Beginning with restraint like a desperate lament - Sarafina bemoaning all that was left unsaid and yearning for memories she will never relive - the track pushes into the red, transforming into a cacophonous, funereal dirge. Deafness. In the end, only flowers on a tombstone remain, and the lonely, dilapidated return of Emalia's amplifier. It is Emlia's relentless, "trashy" guitar that has made Bonnie Trash's live shows as legendary as their records. Led by Sarafina's dark, stoic presence - howling laments in an anguished trance; a leather-clad banshee visiting graves as night winds moan - it is no surprise they have become festival headliners across Canada and were the natural openers for the last show of Toronto underground darlings Dilly Dally. Where most goth bands present themselves as an ethereal apparition, Bonnie Trash is equal parts Stooges and Sisters of Mercy; as much heavy metal as shoegaze. There is plenty of cathedral drama, of course, but never without the crushing weight of a good riff. Anchored by Bellamy's warrior toms and Howarth-Withers' terrifying bass, crashing and hammering like a storm on the gray horizon, Emmalia coats their power chords in distortion and black ink. A punch to the gut in the abyss. Though inspired by the shocking iconography of horror series, horror films, and psychological thrillers, Bonnie Trash upends cinematic clichés. Rather than turning nightmares into reality, the band depicts reality as a nightmare, filled with pain, suffering, and gothic theater. Like their forebears Joy Division, Black Sabbath, or John Carpenter, Bonnie Trash understands that everyday atrocities haunt the periphery of our lives. A black cloud looms at the edge of our field of vision. Curses abound. You cannot ward them off. You might as well make an unholy racket.